Felt

Felt is a textile that is produced by matting, condensing and pressing fibres together. Felt can be made of natural fibres such as wool or synthetic fibres such as acrylic. There are many different types of felts for industrial, technical, designer and craft applications. While some types of felt are very soft, some are tough enough to form construction materials. Felt can vary in terms of fibre content, colour, size, thickness, density and more factors depending on the use of the felt.

Many cultures have legends as to the origins of felt making. Sumerian legend claims that the secret of feltmaking was discovered by Urnamman of Lagash. The story of Saint Clement and Saint Christopher relates that while fleeing from persecution, the men packed their sandals with wool to prevent blisters. At the end of their journey, the movement and sweat had turned the wool into felt socks.

Feltmaking is still practised by nomadic peoples (Altaic people: Mongols; Turkic people) in Central Asia, where rugs, tents and clothing are regularly made. Some of these are traditional items, such as the classic yurt (Gers), while others are designed for the tourist market, such as decorated slippers. In the Western world, felt is widely used as a medium for expression in textile art as well as design, where it has significance as an ecological textile.

Felt Bicycles

Felt Racing is an American bicycle manufacturer based in Irvine, California. Felt produces road, mountain, track, bmx, cyclocross, electric bicycles, and cruiser bikes. All design is completed in the USA and the majority of production comes from Asia. The company also has a strong reputation in the time trial/triathlon bike area. area and for several years provided bicycles to UCI teams in the Tour de France. Felt still supports several professional level race teams including Hincapie Racing and Team Twenty 16.

History

Felt was founded by Jim Felt in early 1994 when Felt products were distributed by Answer Products. Felt nearly disappeared from the domestic market following a fallout with Answer after a 7-year relationship. The brand was relaunched in 2001 as an independent company.

Technology

Felt has developed several unique bicycle technologies. For its time trial/triathlon bikes, Felt has developed the Bayonet Fork, which utilizes an external steerer in front of the head tube for additional stiffness and aerodynamic efficiency. Felt has also developed the Equilink suspension system for its full-suspension mountain bikes.

Felt (album)

Felt is the debut studio album by Anchor & Braille, the side-project of Anberlin lead vocalist, Stephen Christian. The album was released through Christian's own label Wood Water Records and Federal Distribution on August 4, 2009 and was produced, engineered and mixed by Aaron Marsh from fellow Florida-based band Copeland.

Felt debuted at number 30 on the Billboard Top Heatseekers chart.

Release and promotion

Felt is the first release on Christian's own record label, Wood Water Records. Wood Water is distributed by Anberlin's record label Universal Music Group. The album's title was explained by Christian in a press release by the label, "I named the record Felt at the request of a friend because the meaning, much like the songs on the record, has two different levels; a surface and a deeper. The first meaning of the word ‘Felt’ is the past tense of the word ‘feels’ because these songs are all past memories, which I have learned, mourned, and grown from. The second meaning of ‘felt’ is the fabric which connotates a very sensual imagery, hopefully much like the music and melodies themselves."

Index

An index is an indirect shortcut derived from and pointing into a greater volume of values, data, information or knowledge. Index may refer to:

Business

Publishing

Database index

A database index is a data structure that improves the speed of data retrieval operations on a database table at the cost of additional writes and storage space to maintain the index data structure. Indexes are used to quickly locate data without having to search every row in a database table every time a database table is accessed. Indexes can be created using one or more columns of a database table, providing the basis for both rapid random lookups and efficient access of ordered records.

An index is a copy of select columns of data from a table that can be searched very efficiently that also includes a low-level disk block address or direct link to the complete row of data it was copied from. Some databases extend the power of indexing by letting developers create indices on functions or expressions. For example, an index could be created on upper(last_name), which would only store the upper case versions of the last_name field in the index. Another option sometimes supported is the use of partial indices, where index entries are created only for those records that satisfy some conditional expression. A further aspect of flexibility is to permit indexing on user-defined functions, as well as expressions formed from an assortment of built-in functions.

Index (statistics)

In statistics and research design, an index is a composite statistic – a measure of changes in a representative group of individual data points, or in other words, a compound measure that aggregates multiple indicators. Indexes summarize and rank specific observations.

Much data in the field of social sciences is represented in various indices such as Gender Gap Index, Human Development Index or the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

Item in indexes are usually weighted equally, unless there are some reasons against it (for example, if two items reflect essentially the same aspect of a variable, they could have a weight of 0.5 each).

Constructing the items involves four steps. First, items should be selected based on their face validity, unidimensionality, the degree of specificity in which a dimension is to be measured, and their amount of variance. Items should be empirically related to one another, which leads to the second step of examining their multivariate relationships. Third, indexes scores are designed, which involves determining their score ranges and weights for the items. Finally, indexes should be validateds, which involves testing whether they can predict indicators related to the measured variable not used in their construction.